As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, “Where is your God?” These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go to the house of God under the protection of the Mighty One with shouts of joy and praise among the festive throng. Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar. Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me. By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me— a prayer to the God of my life. I say to God my Rock, “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?” My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, “Where is your God?” Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. Psalms 42
I have read many articles and books concerning depression and despair. It is amazing just how much literature is written about personal struggles. Advice abounds. Theories are a dime a dozen. Experiences are as varied as the people that describe them. Treatments are as varied as cognitive therapy to intervention by medication to hospitalization. But one thing we have in common is this: when I say the word despair, you know what I mean. As varied as our experiences in life are, we understand the word despair. I will venture to go further; most of us not only understand it cognitively, but we also understand it emotively. When someone says “despair,” we can relate because we have either known it as a struggle of our own, or we have seen someone else struggle with it.
I told you I have read much about depression. I knew about depression before I ever entered my graduate training in counseling. I have lived it, and I have seen it. That is more than you can receive from any book. To read about it is one thing...to live it is another. Living with despair does not make me an expert on it. It just makes me human, I suppose. My grandfather began alluding to the “suffering of the mind” in some of the final sermons he gave at National City Christian Church. Maybe it was because in early 1975 he saw a doctor in New York about his untreated manic depression. He was in the waiting area, and he struck up a conversation with a woman.
Eventually she asked him about his vocation. He replied that he was in the ministry. And her response was, “Then what the hell are you in here for?” Maybe my grandfather felt the need to assert that even ordained ministers of the Gospel had the right to visit a psychiatrist. Even in 1975, depression and especially manic depression were hardly understood or accepted at that time.
There has always been some unwritten rule that seems to have read, “If you are a ‘real’ Christian, if you really had your relationship right with God, you wouldn't have despair.” What a tragic message to communicate to people.
Instead of giving “padded” answers to problems, the Church Universal should be in dialogue about issues, and we are beginning to see this. We don't need to “preach” at problems. We need to admit problems. We need to come out from our hiding places and begin to remove our facades, however slow the process. We need to say less and listen more.
People who experience despair or depression often lead isolated lives, afraid that it is only about them, that they are the only ones who have such feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. With all my experience with counseling and the use of medication, as important as those ingredients are to a clinical depression, I still believe that Christians also have the Scripture and their faith as the most valuable medicine in their arsenal against depression and despair. So let us examine Psalm 42.
I. The Honesty of the Psalmist
James Draper, in Psalms for Everyday Living, refers to the self-absorbed nature of the psalmist's writings: “Oftentimes depression is selfish, when we focus in on ourselves too much, when we begin to dwell on our problems, our needs, our wants, our desires. Throughout both Psalm 42 and 43, he (the psalmist) wanted his questions answered, his plans fulfilled, and his feelings improved. In fact, in the 16 verses of these two psalms, the author asks `Why’ ten times. In one instance he asked ‘When’ and ‘Where’ twice—thirteen questions. He merely wanted his questions answered. He was so wrapped up in himself, he had trouble seeing God.”
Draper goes on to say, “If you want to stay depressed, major on yourself. Examine yourself more than others.” These are difficult words for me to read and hear: “If you want to stay depressed, major on yourself.”
They are difficult, yet in my experience, I would say they are probably true. If you hear me scolding you for your feelings of sorrow, which you believe to be well-founded, I am not. That is not my job. My job is, however, one of truthfulness. I would like to think that what I am communicating has some truth to it. If it does, I must remind myself, too, that I have been the most depressed when I have been the most isolated and consumed with my own thinking.
The psalmist says that “His tears are his food while his enemies continue to taunt him, saying, ‘Where is this God of yours?’” We sometimes wonder where God is during such times and if there even is a God. Notice in Verse 4 how the psalmist writes, “His heart is breaking when he remembers how things used to be.”
Does that sound familiar? In times of despair, we tend to focus on a past we cannot return to that we have immortalized. Do you ever live from mountain to mountain? Or are you on the level plain most of the time? Or are you consumed by darkness?
I want to try to suggest as a way of remedy for despair that we learn to enjoy the “ordinary” in life. It seems as though we have three levels to our living: the mountain, the plain, and the valley. Much of life is lived on the plain, in the very ordinary stuff of life. The remedy for change is not so much “out there” as it is “in here.” (1)
We can change a lot of things to alter our mood. But true change comes when we can accept the ordinary and find some peace there. It’s not that we settle for less; we are always striving. But people in despair sometimes think true happiness and contentment are just a step away. Then when they make that step, they find that true happiness has moved a step further. And so the game goes.
Many of God's greatest leaders have fought with depression, and God was able to use that depression. Martin Luther, the founder of the Reformation, was known to have deep fits of depression. Nothing would help, even when he was able to translate the Bible into German. Listen to his words: “For more than a week I was close to the gates of death and hell. I trembled in all my members. Christ was wholly lost. I was shaken by desperation and by blasphemy of God.”
Does that sound like a hero of the faith? Yet, Luther also confessed that depression was beneficial, for he said without those experiences no one could understand scriptural faith and the fear and the love of God.
Charles Spurgeon, believed by many to be the greatest preacher of his generation, was often in deep despair. He wrote a letter to his church after being gone for several months. It read, in part, “The furnace still glows around me. Since I last preached to you, I have been brought very low. My flesh has been tortured with pain and my spirit has been prostrate with depression. With some difficulty, I write these lines in my bed, mingling them with the groans of pain and songs of hope. I am as a potter's vessel when it is utterly broken, useless, and laid aside. Nights of watching and days of weeping have been mine, but I hope the cloud is passing. There are dungeons beneath the castle of despair.” (2)
Depression is not a sin. It is not wrong to be in despair. The question becomes: What will we do with it? In Verse 5, the psalmist asks himself why he is discouraged—why it is that he is sad. And then, as if to answer his own question, he exclaims, “I will put my hope in God!”
Maybe he cannot answer every question or every doubt, but he is going to move back in faith to the foundation of his life, and that is God.
II. The Hope of the Psalmist
The answer for the psalmist is somewhat captured in Verse 6: “Now I am deeply discouraged, but I will remember your kindness.” The author is moving from hurt to hope.
There was a woman who was in despair in the final stages of a terminal illness. A kind visitor from the church would come to see her from time to time. One day, the ill woman stood in front of her living room window and said, “It feels like God is completely shut out from my life.” And, in symbolic nature, she slammed the curtains closed. Her friend kindly responded, “Just because you closed the curtains, doesn't mean that the sun isn't still shining.” (3)
It may seem like God is distant at times. The communication lines between yourself and God have been cut. The curtains have been shut. You cannot pray. My grandfather used to tell me that he believed, and I know that the Scripture asserts this, that when we could not pray for ourselves God prayed for us. He is behind the closed curtain, if we have the strength to open it.
“I will put my hope in God,” the psalmist repeats. It doesn't mean he understands everything, but he affirms his faith in the fact that God is in control. I encourage you, and myself, not to slam the curtains shut indefinitely. If they are closed, open them slowly but surely. I can tell you from experience that although it may seem that God has forsaken you, (and, by the way, God can take your anger) it might not be God who is gone. You could have shut him out, even unintentionally.
Interestingly, it is God that we need at such times. When I read the last verses of Psalm 42, I am reminded of Jesus Christ. In the Garden of Gethsemane you will find despair and depression. In Matthew 26:38, Jesus said, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death.”
In Verse 9, the psalmist says, “O God, my rock, why have you forsaken me?” And then in Verse 10 he writes, “Their taunts pierce me like a fatal wound. They scoff, ‘Where is this God of yours?’” Does the setting sound familiar?
If not, think of Golgotha. Picture Jesus on the cross. For some reason, when I picture Christ, my thoughts move to the belief that in Jesus Christ, God knows who I am. God knows what I feel. God in Jesus Christ, as mysterious as it is, is what makes our faith so unique and so special.
The story never ends with the curtain shut. The story never ends on a lonely cross at Golgotha. In Verse 11, the psalmist says, “Why am I discouraged? Why so sad? I will put my hope in God! I will praise him again – my Savior and my God!” Like the psalmist, you and I have a choice as to the way our life will go. Maybe not control, but a choice in how we look at life. The question is, how will we handle our despair? Endure it? Escape it? Or learn from it?
In a little book of sermons, Coming to Terms with Life, Dr. William Elliott, former pastor of Highland Park Presbyterian Church in the 1940s, quotes a well-known poem in his sermon “Are You Disappointed?” Listen to his words: “God has not promised skies always blue—flower strewn pathways all our lives through—God has not promised sun without rain—joy without sorrow—peace without pain. But God has promised strength for the day. Rest for your labor, light for the way, grace for the trials, help from above, unfailing sympathy, undying love.” (4) I don't know your situation. God does. You may not believe in Him. He believes in you. Maybe you feel weary, and you feel as though you have tried your hand at “religion.” Maybe there are times you feel abandoned by God.
During the last days of World War II, the body of an elderly Jewish gentleman was found in a bombed out basement in Berlin. Before he died, the old man had taken a piece of chalk and scrawled the following words on the wall: “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I do not feel it. I believe in God even when He is silent.”
Take Jesus’s crucifixion, for example. Now known as Good Friday, the first Friday, when Jesus was on the cross, must not have seemed all that “good” to the followers of Christ. In fact, it must have seemed pretty bleak, dark, and full of despair.
The disciples had every right to feel abandoned. They were human. And so are we. But never give in to despair because you never know what tomorrow may bring. God's plan, as strange and untimely as it may seem, always has the last word. After all, Friday does become Easter Sunday.
1. PSALMS FOR EVERYDAY LIVING, "Reaching Up From Despair," pp.39-48. James T. Draper, Jr., Broadman Press, 1992.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. By Frances Ridley Havergal. Quoted from "Coming to Terms With Life", William M. Elliott Jr., pp. 138-139. John Knox Press, 1944.
